Wikipedia reaches the 500,000 mark

The Wikimedia Foundation is happy to announce that its free online Wikipedia encyclopedia features now more than 500,000 English pages! Article number 500,000 is about "Involuntary settlements in the Soviet Union".

The total of 500,000 articles far exceeds any other encyclopedia project. At the average of 2,500 characters per article, this is 1.25 gigabytes of raw text, which if printed double-sided would form a stack about 66 feet or over 6 stories tall.